View Slide Show16 Photographs

A Momentous Day Driven by Ordinary People

By Maurice BergerAug. 22, 2013Aug. 22, 2013

Correction appended.

Hours before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 50 years ago, pedestrians on their way to work scurried past the Petersen House, across the street from Ford’s Theater, its conspicuous sign proclaiming it as the “house where Lincoln died.”

Though the passers-by were distracted, the photographer who captured the image of them, Leonard Freed, was not. He knew that soon, just blocks away, another event would inexorably alter the nation and its uneasy history of race relations.

This photograph (Slide 14) is one of many incisive images by Mr. Freed featured in “This Is the Day: The March on Washington” (J. Paul Getty Museum), a book with essays by the civil rights leader Julian Bond, the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson and the scholar Paul M. Farber. Rather than focusing on the immensity of the crowd or the epochal speeches, Mr. Freed aimed to capture the marchers and their range of responses and emotions: the exuberance, intensity, determination, focus and, inevitably, weariness that reflect the back story of a momentous day.

The march, Mr. Farber wrote, offered Mr. Freed “a spectacle — not for marveling from afar or at a fixed distance, but for exploring at ground level.” The night before, the photographer and his wife, Brigitte, had slept at a campsite outside of the city. Awakening at 5 a.m., they drove into Washington a few hours before the march’s official start. Once at the site, Mr. Freed wandered through the mass of demonstrators. His photographs provide one of the best records of the geographic, racial and generational diversity of the marchers and the groups they represented.

Mr. Farber points to one “historical peculiarity” in Mr. Freed’s documentation of the march: its keynote speaker, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., appears in only one image, barely discernible as he delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, surrounded by hordes of spectators. For Mr. Dyson, the sociologist, that photograph (Slide 6) reveals a fundamental truth: while Dr. King was a commanding leader, “he wasn’t the only, and often not even the primary, vehicle” for a movement driven largely by ordinary people.

In hindsight, his absence from the images may also reflect Mr. Freed’s acknowledgment of the limitations of photography. While still pictures were an undeniably powerful medium for documenting important events, they could do little to communicate the words, cadences or inferences of a speech. In that area, television excelled.

As the New York Times television critic Jack Gould observed at the time, television, unlike the “frozen word or stilled picture” of magazines and newspapers, was able to capture the march’s sensory and aural richness. By 1963, television cameramen could use lightweight, 16-millimeter cameras to navigate fluidly through fast-paced events and shoot them up close and in real time. And Telstar satellites launched the previous year allowed their images to be relayed swiftly around the globe.

Dr. King also understood the potential of television news, and its balance of spoken word and moving image, to influence public opinion.

“The march was the first organized Negro operation which was accorded respect and coverage commensurate with its importance,” he said. “The millions who viewed it on television were seeing an event historic not only because of the subject but because it was being brought into their homes.”

But where television sometimes fails — in that its swift pace leaves little room to dwell on the visual details of a story — the photograph excels. It demands our sustained attention, teasing out the complexities, the incongruities and, as Mr. Freed’s image of the Petersen House attests, the ironies of ostensibly straightforward circumstances. Its attention to visual nuance commands us to stare, to think, to imagine and, ultimately, to feel.

Mr. Freed, a pioneer in the genre of socially conscious photojournalism, captured the march in ways both intimate and penetrating: the sartorial flair of demonstrators, dressed in their Sunday finery, conscious of their role as media ambassadors; sequential images of a singing woman, enraptured by her quest for equality; the middle-aged couple acknowledging the solemnity of the day by bowing their heads in prayer (Slide 7); and the weary marcher on her way home, lost in thought as she gazed out a bus window (Slide 15).

By slowing down to observe a fast-paced event, these pictures tell us much about the dynamics of race in America. For one, as Mr. Dyson points out, the panoply of African-American marchers in a “rainbow” of skin colors reveals the mutability of racial categories, an insight that also challenges stereotypes. “Dark-skinned blacks who were usually only photographed in buffoonish exaggeration,” Mr. Dyson wrote, “get from Freed a forgiving realism that rescues the blackest blacks from the wasteland of stereotype and restores them to the majestic ordinariness.”

By focusing on the psychic and emotional responses of African-Americans, these photographs challenge the news media’s tendency to see the struggle for racial equality through the eyes and anxieties of white people. In Mr. Freed’s documentation of the march, whites are present, but blacks are in charge. If whites were necessary for peaceful racial coexistence, as symbolized by a photograph of interracial protesters linking arms, Mr. Freed represented them “without the pretense of superiority or the burden of nobility,” Mr. Dyson wrote.

In the end, the images of “This Is the Day” exemplify Mr. Freed’s lifelong quest to show “the connection between things, how they relate.” If coverage of the march in the news media, especially on television, was sweeping and impressionistic, these photographs unveil the intimate human connections that together produced one of the nation’s most consequential events. Fifty years later, they remind us that while Dr. King’s speech was justly enshrined in history, it was but one of the march’s many poignant moments.

Correction, Aug. 22: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified Ford’s Theater as “the house where Lincoln died.” President Lincoln died across the street, at the Petersen House.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York.